China, Addicted to Bootleg Software, Reels from Ransomware Attack
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I lived in China (Guangzhou) for several years, and it was literally impossible to buy a computer with a legal copy of windows installed on it (or, failing that, a standalone windows disc) in the main computer district of the city.
I eventually had to hop the border to Hong Kong when I wanted to buy a laptop.
Seems like plenty of choices to me.
I think Macbooks are pretty expensive in China (last I checked, this was a few years ago, so this might have changed), which is why people are gonna leap for the cheaper alternatives.
Not only is that a viable approach, I'd take any bet you'd like that she'd get better support from them than any 'big brand' supplier of Windoze boxen.
(Actually, I'd probably say "holy shit I thought you were dead", but that's specific to my mother).
I have tried what passes for an IME for Linux desktop applications (formerly SCIM, now IBus). It doesn't work with some applications. It crashes some applications sporadically. And one technology was replaced by another that doesn't work the same way without a smooth upgrade path.
If you are a power user who has been using *nix for years and reading lots of documentation in English, you can come up with the right configuration and workarounds for occasional typing in CJK. That's no way to actually use a computer to do things if your primary language is Chinese.
And now I have no idea what's going to happen with Wayland.
Why does one need an excuse for copyright violation?
http://praxeology.net/anticopyright.htm
Still an area I'm mulling over.
Every laptop that I have owned came with legal copy of Windows with it. My family members have brought numerous legal copies (discs) from a local "computer district" as well.
A sticker says Windows is installed... it doesn't say anything about legality.
OP said "I couldn't find a laptop with a legal copy of Windows installed". Responder said "Everything I got was legal, and had no issues buying new discs with legal licenses".
Responder said "it is quite possible (even common) to buy a computer with a legal copy of windows installed on it" and asked "is a Windows sticker on a laptop good proof for legally installed Windows?" with the assumption that pirated Windows does not come with a sticker.
PS: That assumption turns out to be debatable [0].
[0]: https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a21m2.8232368.0.0.TlUMn...
Last time I had to buy Windows install media I went directly to a Microsoft corporate store.
For the record, I was visiting Gangding in Guangzhou (the computer District) several times between 2012-14. Every vendor I found was baffled by my request and didn't know why I would ever want this.
I bought my laptop in 2014 in Hong Kong after my UK-bought one died.
[0] https://support.hp.com/cn-zh/document/c01902861
[1] http://iknow.lenovo.com/detail/dc_038423.html
[2] http://www.dell.com/support/contents/cn/zh/cnbsd1/article/Pr...
I have no idea where you were/are in China, but it was impossible to buy a genuine copy of Windows or a computer with it installed when I was in Guangzhou.
Actually, the laptops I tried out were almost all Dell + Lenovo (I wanted a thinkpad or XPS). I think, as another commenter said, they were probably Linux + FreeDOS systems originally. What the store owners would do is use Norton Ghost to put whatever (illegal) OS I wanted on there.
I think maybe there are large regional differences in product availability or regulation. I know it was a lot harder to buy iPhones in certain tier 1 Chinese cities than others when I was there, for example.
What the store owners would do is use Norton Ghost to put whatever (illegal) OS I wanted on there.
Home baked RTOSes prosper though.
The high prevalence in China (and Russia) might also indicate that these systems were hacked by the NSA prior to the Microsoft March 2017 update patch and the WannaCry ransomware.
(Of course, if it's cracked in some way to circumvent that without paying then it's illegal.)
Also, you're thinking of 'pirating' as equating going to the pirate bay, digging through the slew of junk in there, getting a whole bunch of complicated key gen and activation blockers or what not and ending up with a crippled system. Pirated Windows in China is very much a commercially finished product fully packaged as a consumer friendly product that's probably easier to install than vanilla licensed Windows.
Turned out nobody wanted Linux on the desktop.
EDIT: Sorry, my mistake. It's already in 28 languages, like the posters below pointed out. I only ever saw the English screenshot and made the incorrect assumption.
[0] http://thehackernews.com/2015/10/cryptowall-ransomware.html
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2082204/crime-pays-very-well-...
From a programmers perspective, what is this thing doing? Is there an nmap filter to find vulnerable clients yet? If not, how do I create one. I'd like to be pro-active with my current customers concerns.
Thanks,
now you get noise coverage everywhere.
Effectively to filter it you need to block all SMBv1 packets. Which you should do already because the modern SMB is v3
Let alone you shouldn't be listening for AD management commands from the wide internet.
A young student uses pirated Photoshop at home instead of Paint.NET, and many years later, if he becomes a graphic designer he will demand his employer to buy him a Photoshop licence.
It's just another way of doing price segmentation, with a special segment of "price 0".
A lot of these cracked copies of Windows were installed by cloning a master image, which was heavily customised using unofficial tools such as Dism++ and did so aggresively that the many of the underlying dependencies were left permanently damaged. The system will appear fine however many official patches could break it.
A number of homegrown security suites actually blocked the installation of the relevant patch in March due to a correct if not misguided decision that this patch would make many cloned installations unbootable unless the user was capable of performing a manual repair process.
Patching is never that simple in the real world. I've had to roll back a few patches myself after them made various production software fail to run (in one case, Microsoft Office). A number of streamers also had their line of work affected after a Windows 10 update borked certain aspects of sound capture - if they had any faith in the updating process they probably won't have any left after it gets in their line of work.
The newly installed Windows asks for activation and you just ignore it forever.
You can't choose a desktop background and are greeted with a "You may have been victim of software piracy" every now and them, but Windows Update works pretty fine.
You are probably right about the DVD containing modified images (with malware, probably) but they work OK.
There is a huge shady industry of preloading applications that were often borderline malware so the competition between different brands of custom image is quite fierce. Once of the reasons of aggressive patch installer pruning is because "my installation is 500MB smaller than yours" would take a great selling point.
If I were more paranoid than I am I would wonder if this NSA "leak" was by design.
But probably not, never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance I guess!
The entire Sony hack attribution to North Korea was already shady, at best.
Saying a nation-state actor hacked you makes it look a lot less worse than "some disgruntled ex-employee" or a 20-something year old student.
I'm not saying this attribution is incorrect, but it's very hard to separate the wheat from the chaff with these kind of news articles, even from sources I'd normally consider reputable.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/live/2017/may/12/england...
How hard would it be to put a supported windows on the network right next to the XP box and transfer files via flash drives?
a free OS is fundamental.
There are many viable alternatives that do not suffer from any of these issues.
This narrative was probably true years ago, not in 2017.
Where is the global Android ransomware scandal?
Malware targets Windows because Windows is the low hanging fruit.
WannaCrypt on the other hand relied on NSA's ETERNALBLUE and DOUBLEPULSAR exploits so that computers sharing a network could get infected without doing anything.
Aside from that, most people would just reset their phone if they got ransomware since most of the important data on a phone is already backed up to the cloud. So there's less of a payout as well.
But the difference is that if a vulnerability was found in Linux, people would quickly get it fixed then get their machines patched for free.
Now, this is a Microsoft insider talking about the development process in their kernel: http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-w...
Is this really true though? Wouldn't they, on average, have way more disposable income than the average windows user? I'm thinking something along the lines of the Pareto principle in conjunction with your disposable income being correlated with owning a mac.
Having said that, have you seen the amount of malware hiding in advertisements for Android? There's a lot.
Pure gold
It's a zinger though, I guess.
He said: "Mac won't run AutoCad."
I said: "You can't afford AutoCad."
He just laughed. Pirate software drove his choice of platform.
If it was from a well-known OEM, it would be the Linux/freeDOS version, and the retail store would help install a pirated copy of Windows for you.
They have about 150 transactions on their accounts, totally tens of thousands of dollars at max.
What if a different kind of criminal had used these exploits? Not one that wanted $300 in bitcoin, but one that actually wanted to cause harm? They could have deleted files and never given them back, and they could have stopped any software running on the machines.
That still hasn't moved out from the wallets.
If I would be LE I would spam tumblers with my own bitcoin, just to reduce the number of further leads.
They of course already have this feature, but it is not a worm.